Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We’ve been doing a series of Counsels for a Healthy and a Holy Spirituality. The last counsel we offered was right knowledge, meaning that we need to have a correct understanding of ourselves and of God if we’re going to grow in a healthy way.
We spoke about the understanding of God that St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus had. How did Thérèse understand herself in God’s eyes? She had a humble and honest view of who she was. She saw herself as imperfect, as weak in practicing virtue, as incapable of doing good without God’s help. And at the same time, she knew that God looked on her with delight, not with disappointment. She knew He always had a loving disposition towards her, and He actually does towards each of us, by the way.
So if you still haven’t committed to any particular discipline for your prayer Lenten season, you might want to pray each day that the Lord would help you to understand how He looks on you with love and goodness and gentleness.
Thérèse writes at one point in her autobiography, she says, “It may be that someday my present state, meaning her last illness, will appear to me full of defects, but nothing now surprises me. And I do not even distress myself because I am so weak. On the contrary, I glory therein and expect each day to find fresh imperfections,” she said.
And she writes in a letter to Céline, she said, “We should like to suffer generously and nobly. We should like to never fall. What an illusion. What does it matter to me if I fall at every moment? And that way I realize my weakness, and I gain from it,” she says.
So Thérèse sought God’s strength in her weakness. She didn’t see failure. You know why? Because her focus was more on Him than on herself.
St. Francis de Sales, in a letter to St. Jane de Chantal, told her that humility is the acknowledgement of our lowliness, but the highest point of humility is not just knowing your lowliness, but actually loving it. And that’s what Thérèse did. She could love her lowliness because she knew that she was loved.
Oddly, paradoxically, in a Theresian fashion, she found her faults and her struggles as a source of encouragement, not as a source of discouragement. Thérèse never got discouraged because, again, her focus was more on her Savior than on herself. She focused on the love and the goodness that He is, and on the love and goodness that He is towards her.
In short, St. Thérèse saw herself as little and loved. Because she knew that God loved her, she felt free to love in return, free to love God and free to love others, too. She loved the Lord both as His beloved child and also as His beloved spouse, willing to sacrifice everything, even her very life, for Jesus, her divine Bridegroom.
So one question would be: have you ever had anyone in your life who was very loving towards you, no matter what? You know, whether you did good or bad or whatever situation you were in—if you ever had someone like that in your life, not everyone has, but if you ever have—at a certain point you usually realize that it’s... they love you not because of how good or gifted you are; they actually love you because of how good they are. That was the case with the Little Flower. Thérèse knew that she was loved not because of how good she was, but because of how good God is.
She knew that, for example, when she prayed, God loved listening to her because He delighted in hearing from someone whom He loved so deeply. In reality, it’s no different from our situation, meaning that God loves when we pray to Him first and foremost because He loves hearing from His beloved child. And Thérèse had that deep sense of God’s love for her. That’s how she understood herself.
Lastly, for today, she knew that she was also called to be a light to the world. Shortly before her death, she told Mother Agnes; she said, “I feel that my mission is soon to begin, my mission to make others love God as I love Him, to teach souls my Little Way.”  So she understood herself as a missionary charged with spreading the good news of the Gospel and especially having people comprehend the good news of the loving nature of God. She knew that a big part of her legacy would be to give God good press, as they say—not bad press, but good press.
So when we understand God’s love and His goodness and are able to take that to heart, as St. Thérèse did, we can do great, great things.
Let’s ask Our Lady for that grace of a proper understanding of the Lord and of who we are in His eyes.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.